BREWSTER – On the first day of the new year, Governor Maura Healey and Lieutenant Governor Kim Driscoll bestowed Cape Cod environmental non-profit Sustainable Practices with a Governor’s Citation for their efforts to ban single-use plastic bottles and takeout containers in the region.
The Municipal Plastic Bottle Ban is currently a bylaw or policy in all 15 Cape towns, with Commercial Single-Use Bans in nine towns, and two more towns, Harwich and Yarmouth, adopting Plastic Reduction Bans targeting single-use plastic takeout containers.
Representatives of the non-profit expressed thanks for the honor and said that their strategy moving forward in 2024 is to strengthen collaborative efforts with Cape Towns and environmental organizations to enact a Cape-wide adoption of the ban and plastic reduction initiative.
According to Madhavi Venkatesan, founder and Executive Director of Sustainable Practices, a concerted regional effort is necessary to enact meaningful change, and plastic recycling is not a viable long-term solution.
“The prices of single-use plastic products do not reflect their true cost,” said Venkatesan. “Sustainable Practices’ efforts offer an opportunity to elevate the standards for the Cape visitor and resident, promote the health and well-being of the environment, and provide optimism for the present and future.”
“Given the range and number of annual visitors to Cape Cod, a unified Cape approach to the elimination of single-use plastic provides the real-time example that local change has the potential for global impacts.”
To learn more about Sustainable Practices, click here.
About Matthew Tomlinson
